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9/11Gitta Sereny Albert Speer His Battle With Truth
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Gitta Sereny Albert Speer His Battle With Truth
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- folkscanomy_biography; folkscanomy; additional_collections
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Albert Speer was not only Hitler's architect and armaments minister, but the Fuhrer's closest friend--his "unhappy love." Speer was one of the few defendants at the Nuremberg Trials to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even as he denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Now this enigma of a man is unveiled in a monumental biography by a writer who came to know Speer intimately in his final years. Out of hundreds of hours of interviews, Sereny unravels the threads of Speer's personality: the genius that made him indispensable to the German war machine, the conscience that drove him to repent, and the emotional wounds that made him susceptible to Hitler's lethal magnetism. Read as an inside account of the Third Reich, or as a revelatory unsparing yet compassionate study of the human capacity for evil, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is a triumph.
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gallowglass
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November 23, 2020 (edited)
Subject: Sliding Out From Under
Subject: Sliding Out From Under
Until I came across this book, I had figured Albert Speer as the only one of Hitler’s inner circle that I might actually like to have met. He seemed
...
a man of taste and distinction, far removed from the thuggish world that the rest of them lived in - mostly immature, twisted, unhappy men, trying to compensate for their inadequacies by lashing out at decent, normal families.
The huge success of his memoirs confirms that plenty of other people must have shared this view, unaware that they had swallowed an elaborate myth carefully constructed by Speer during his 20-year captivity.
His rise to fame under Nazism is easily explained. We know that he was everything that the young Hitler had longed to be: a respected architect, handsome, charming and well-connected. That was one powerful bond. But it turned out there was another. As is well known, Hitler could never see the point of telling the truth. As is less well known, neither could Speer.
And so we have ‘Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth’. It’s certainly one hell of a detective story, and Gitta Sereny digs deep into her subject, through extensive interviews with his surviving family and colleagues. We learn, for example, that Germany missed its chance to get in first with the atom bomb, because Hitler identified atomic research with the non-Aryan Einstein. And we get confirmation that Hess had indeed met the Duke of Hamilton at the Berlin Olympics (as repeatedly denied by Hamilton).
Personally I had been hoping for her verdict on one minor curiosity: how could Speer actually know that Hitler never watched ‘The Great Dictator’? And a much bigger bombshell, if true - his claim that the Duke of Windsor (in the short interval when he was King, and without consulting parliament) reassured the Führer that Britain would not oppose his illegal occupation of the Rhine. On both scores, I’m still waiting.
But it is now that we spot the fatal flaw in the great work. The blunt fact that Speer’s ‘battle with truth’ simply renders all his reports unreliable. As historical research it is entirely unusable. It can be of value only to those making a clinical study of denial as a psychological defence mechanism.
His denial shows up in his various unconvincing excuses. Talking of Hitler’s curious ignoring of D-Day, Speer says: “As you can see, it was not only I who lived a schizophrenic existence. We all did, Hitler perhaps most of all.” And asked whether he knew about the Final Solution: “One ‘sensed’ there was something wrong. But you see, sensing isn’t knowing.” And perhaps most slimy of all: “Of course I was dishonest with him, but only relatively.”
The huge success of his memoirs confirms that plenty of other people must have shared this view, unaware that they had swallowed an elaborate myth carefully constructed by Speer during his 20-year captivity.
His rise to fame under Nazism is easily explained. We know that he was everything that the young Hitler had longed to be: a respected architect, handsome, charming and well-connected. That was one powerful bond. But it turned out there was another. As is well known, Hitler could never see the point of telling the truth. As is less well known, neither could Speer.
And so we have ‘Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth’. It’s certainly one hell of a detective story, and Gitta Sereny digs deep into her subject, through extensive interviews with his surviving family and colleagues. We learn, for example, that Germany missed its chance to get in first with the atom bomb, because Hitler identified atomic research with the non-Aryan Einstein. And we get confirmation that Hess had indeed met the Duke of Hamilton at the Berlin Olympics (as repeatedly denied by Hamilton).
Personally I had been hoping for her verdict on one minor curiosity: how could Speer actually know that Hitler never watched ‘The Great Dictator’? And a much bigger bombshell, if true - his claim that the Duke of Windsor (in the short interval when he was King, and without consulting parliament) reassured the Führer that Britain would not oppose his illegal occupation of the Rhine. On both scores, I’m still waiting.
But it is now that we spot the fatal flaw in the great work. The blunt fact that Speer’s ‘battle with truth’ simply renders all his reports unreliable. As historical research it is entirely unusable. It can be of value only to those making a clinical study of denial as a psychological defence mechanism.
His denial shows up in his various unconvincing excuses. Talking of Hitler’s curious ignoring of D-Day, Speer says: “As you can see, it was not only I who lived a schizophrenic existence. We all did, Hitler perhaps most of all.” And asked whether he knew about the Final Solution: “One ‘sensed’ there was something wrong. But you see, sensing isn’t knowing.” And perhaps most slimy of all: “Of course I was dishonest with him, but only relatively.”
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